From The Comic's Comic

It’s Grammy night, so let’s start with a fun thought experiment and a fun fact before we get into nitty gritty gripes and snubs and figuring out what’s what regarding the best comedy of 2023.

On the former: There has to be someone out there who had a grandmother named Emmy, grandfathers named Tony and Oscar, and could therefore call their other grandma Grammy, am I right or am I absolutely positively right? On the latter: Befitting both the Recording Academy’s “A GRAMMY Salute To 50 Years Of Hip-Hop,” which aired two months ago, as well as February’s Black History Month, perhaps it’s more than about time that we recognize and appreciate the fact that the first hip-hop recording came not 50 years ago but 56 years ago thanks to a comedian: Pigmeat Markham.

Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham (1904-1981) worked the Chitlin’ Circuit and the Apollo theater for decades before breaking through in a big way in the 1950s with multiple appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. In a situation that may sound familiar to generations of younger comedians complaining that their bits had been stolen by more famous comics and TV shows, Markham’s “judge” routine went mainstream first via Sammy Davis Jr. doing it in a sketch on Martin & Rowan’s Laugh-In.

But Markham didn’t get completely overlooked. Instead, the exposure led to Markham’s original version getting recorded and released in the summer of 1968, and Markham himself made 12 appearances on Laugh-In during the 68-69 season. For a double dose of bonus fun facts regarding Markham’s “Here Comes The Judge” single (which was a Top 20 hit in the UK): Minnie Riperton (mother to Maya Rudolph) provided backing vocals on the track, while the drum beat came courtesy of Maurice White, future founder of Earth, Wind & Fire!

So whenever someone wants to debate the origins of hip-hop in the Bronx in the 1970s, just know that the court of recorded opinion ruled in favor of Pigmeat Markham first in the 1960s.

IN MEMORIAM: P.D.Q. BACH

On this Grammy night, we also pay homage to Johann Peter Schickele, whose parody of a composer named P.D.Q. Bach won four consecutive Grammys for Comedy Album of the Year from 1990-1993, died last month at his home in the Catskills. Schickele was 88.

Born on July 17, 1935, Schickele was the son of academic immigrants from France, graduating with music degrees from Swarthmore and Juilliard. An admirer of musical parodist Spike Jones, Schickele began presenting comedic concerts of his own during his time at Juilliard, and developed his P.D.Q. Bach character over the course of the annual concerts at Town Hall and later Lincoln Center in the 1960s and 70s. He also received a Grammy nomination for his score of Oh, Calcutta!

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Dave Chappelle Wins Grammy For A Speech To High Schoolers

Dave Chappelle has received five nominations for Comedy Album of the Year, and as of tonight, he has won the award all five times.

This year feels more frustratingly suspect.

You could argue that Grammy voters always have been somewhat circumspect in their choices for both nominations and winners over the years, and the Comedy category has been no exception. The first-ever Comedy Grammy went to Ross S. Bagdasarian in 1959 for “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” (Ross was the “Dave” who managed Alvin and the Chipmunks). Two years later, Bob Newhart won three Grammys including Best Album of the Year (for “The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart”) Best Comedy Performance – Spoken Word (for “The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!”) and Best New Artist.

In fact, the Recording Academy changed the rules of the Comedy Album category after PDQ Bach’s fourth straight win. And in more recent years, Grammy voters have suffered from name-recognition syndrome. Despite the digital comedy boom opening up the field to hundreds of newer stand-ups to record and distribute their best work in album, CD and digital formats, only the most famous and already-nominated stand-ups ever seem to earn Grammy nominations. But perhaps the most damning trend of late? Grammy noms and wins dominated by video specials over actual albums.

Best Comedy Album
I Wish You Would, Trevor Noah
I’m an Entertainer, Wanda Sykes
Selective Outrage, Chris Rock
Someone You Love, Sarah Silverman
What’s in a Name?, Dave Chappelle

Of this year’s nominees, only Silverman’s “album” is available to listen to on Apple Music or Spotify. The Grammys have to eliminate this loophole once and for all, because it’s not funny. You shouldn’t win Comedy Album of the Year if you cannot buy the comedy as an album (and please don’t allow printing a dozen limited-edition vinyls to count for eligibility). Video specials have Emmys. Funny audio deserves to be heard and recognized by the Grammys.

Chappelle’s fifth win in the category moves him past Schickele and Robin Williams, into a tie with George Carlin and Richard Pryor (only Bill Cosby has more wins in the category with seven). And yet, even the most ardent Chappelle fans have to acknowledge that What’s In A Name? which premiered all the way back in July 2022 (!!!) on Netflix wasn’t stand-up comedy. As I wrote back then in my review for Decider: “Most of the laugh-out-loud lines come from inside jokes, as Chappelle references specific teachers, departments, fellow alums and even rival schools. This is, after all, an acceptance speech. Don’t get it confused for a proper stand-up comedy special, or any other kind of comedy special.“

Grammy voters got confused. Which is odd considering they did put his previous work of impassioned speech into the Spoken Word category back in 2022 (where Chappelle’s sole Grammy loss occurred when Don Cheadle’s narration of Carry On: Reflections for a New Generation from John Lewis won out over Chappelle’s 8:46).

Better luck to all of the stand-ups who release comedy albums between Sept. 16, 2023, and Aug. 30, 2024, I guess?!?

Reassessing Last Year’s Specials of 2023

So what if we tried to put the ridiculousness of the Grammys and their off-year calendar behind us (and the new Golden Globes comedy category, which in the most Globesian way rewarded their favorite Globes host despite not seeing or hearing the new Ricky Gervais special before nominating him)? What if we really tried to quantify and acknowledge the best comedy specials of 2023?

What would that even look like?

And how many specials are we actually talking about?

Please bear in mind that there’s still no guaranteed way to document all of the comedy specials that get released, because there’s no clear-cut agreed-upon place for everyone to stand up and be recognized. But for the past year, I made a rigorously honest attempt to catch ’em all like Pokémon. Now that the year has passed, I went back and reviewed my notes, rectified some errors along the way and also recalculated to account for the difference between “hours” and “half-hours” (NOTE: I used 35 minutes as the demarcation cut-off point).

Which resulted in a grand total of AT LEAST…

508 full “hour” solo stand-up specials in 2023

FIVE HUNDRED AND EIGHT.

AT. THE. VERY. LEAST.

January

• HOURS: 24
• HALF-HOURS: 20

February

• HOURS: 49
• HALF-HOURS: 14

March

• HOURS: 51
• HALF-HOURS 15
• OTHER: WellRED special on Amazon

April

• HOURS: 53
• HALF-HOURS: 16
• OTHER: Roast of Bert Kreischer; Stavros Halkias: Four Nights in NYC crowd work

May

• HOURS: 38
• HALF-HOURS: 13
• OTHER: Roast of Whitney Cummings

June

• HOURS: 41 (*includes Matt Rife: Walking Red Flag crowd work special)
• HALF-HOURS: 12

July

• HOURS: 33
• HALF-HOURS: 15

August

• HOURS: 34
• HALF-HOURS: 16

September

• HOURS: 39
• HALF-HOURS: 20

October

• HOURS: 52
• HALF-HOURS: 13

November

• HOURS: 43
• HALF-HOURS: 13

December

• HOURS: 51
• HALF-HOURS: 17

TOTAL HOURS FOR 2023 = 508

TOTAL HALF-HOURS FOR 2023 = 184

The Best Comedy Specials of 2023, Then….?

John Mulaney’s Baby J won both at the Critics’s Choice Awards and the writing category at the Emmys, which would seem to give him the edge on the title for best comedy special of 2023.

Which also leaves me feeling slightly embarrassed for not including him anywhere on my own Top 10 list nor even my honorable mentions. What’s up with that, indeed?! Then again, there were so many good/great comedy hours put out last year among the 508 I counted that my list also somehow “snubbed” Sam Jay, Sarah Silverman, Jesus Trejo, Jim Jefferies, and Michelle Wolf (all of whom had landed on one of my previous years Top 10s), as well as Nick Griffin, Dina Hashem, Louis Katz, Hari Kondabolu, or Nimesh Patel.

But if I took my list, Critics’ Choice, Emmys, and fit them into a poll of polls that also included my colleague Jason Zinoman at The New York Times, the critics at Vulture, Paste Magazine, Interrobang, and 800 Pound Gorilla Media (note: they also produce and release specials), then perhaps a definitive best of the best might emerge, right? So that’s what I did. I took their individual Top 10s and assigned points 10 for tops and 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 for the rest, and if they only picked a best with other nominees, their best got 10 points with the others splitting remainders.

If you do that as best you can, then you wind up with this composite poll of nine different sources revealing these as perhaps the best comedy specials of 2023:

1. 40 John Mulaney: Baby J (4 first-place votes)
2. 37 Beth Stelling: If You Didn’t Like Me Then
3. 33 Gary Gulman: Born on Third Base
4. 31 Joe Pera: Slow & Steady (1 first)
5. 25 Marc Maron: From Bleak To Dark (2 first)
6. 24 Wanda Sykes: I’m An Entertainer
7. 23 John Early: Now More Than Ever
8. 23 Chris Rock: Selective Outrage
9. 21 Sam Jay: Salute Me or Shoot Me
10. 18 Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man and The Pool

Rounding out the Top 25 (in descending order): Jim Gaffigan: Dark Pale (1 first); Sasheer Zamata: The First Woman; Hari Kondabolu: Vacation Baby; Kathleen Madigan: Hunting Bigfoot (1 first); Pete Holmes: I Am Not For Everyone; Sarah Silverman: Someone You Love; in a multi-way tie (alphabetical order) Maria Bamford: Local Act; Nate Bargatze: Hello World; Alex Borstein: Corsets & Clown Suits; Chris Fleming: Hell; Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs; Jessica Kirson: No Material; Joe List: Enough For Everybody; Nathan Macintosh: Money Never Wakes; Trevor Noah: Where Was I; Mark Normand: Soup To Nuts; Ali Siddiq: The Domino Effect Part 2 LOSS; Marlon Wayans: God Loves Me.

Also making at least one Top 10 list: Emma Arnold: Myself; Zainab Johnson: Hijabs Off; Mae Martin: SAP; My Name Is Mo’Nique; Ralph Barbosa: Cowabunga; Dina Hashem: Dark Little Whispers; Greg Warren: The Salesman.

I didn’t include the Globes: Doing so wouldn’t replace anyone in the composite Top 10, but would bump Sykes and Rock up to 5th and 6th, respectively.

Aren’t you glad we’re done handing out awards or thinking about 2023, now?!?